There is a whole vendor ecosystem around high-end SPARC/Solaris systems, especially in financial services and telcos. It could take a number of years for these corporations to move onto IBM gear if that was the key.
Dropping SPARC completely would be foolish, better just rebrand everything to IBM and take it from there.
Agreed. Remember, IBM already has quite a few different hardware platforms: x86 based servers (running Linux or Windows), System p (formerly RS/6000) servers running AIX, System i (formerly AS/400) servers, System x (formerly system/390) mainframes. Adding Solaris Sparc to that would be just be adding one more to a long list. I don't think IBM would have trouble supporting Solaris for a very long time so long as customers still want it.
For me, IBM has looked likely to buy Sun for many years, because doing so would give IBM two things that would be very valuable to it
There are other SPARC vendors (e.g. Fujitsu) that they could sell off to and focus on their own lines (probably with a provision to use the IP they see useful).
Edit: Btw, the ecosystem around SPARC is slowly eroding. Fin Svcs are going x86 more and more. The problem with SPARC is they aren't growing in new markets - it's becoming marginalised.
Enterprise Linux variants are the strategic Unix platform in the City of London (world's largest financial services market), and have been at most places for a few years now.
Just finished up working for IBM at a major ex-state-monopoly Telco, working at the worlds largest hedge fund right now.
I'm a huge fan of the SPARC architecture, and I would LOVE to be able to run 32 threads simultaneously on one machine but unless Sun gets that stuff in the cloud it is dead to me.
That's been true of every other architecture that was inexorably marginalized by x86. You're right that IBM isn't going to unceremoniously drop it. But it's dead, and good riddance.
I remember McNealy admitting they underestimated 32 bit architecture and placed too much on 64 bit.
Another error might have been overvaluing its vertically integrated SW/HW solution technically and financially, and not commoditizing it quickly enough through open-source and hardware cloning.
Spreading one's wealth goes against one's better judgement often, but the rewards come back in unseen ways.
In Sun's case I think it's simpler than that: SPARC hardware carries a steep premium over commodity x86, a good chunk of that premium is actually intended to pay for Sun's software stack, and Sun simply hasn't executed well enough on the software side to merit the premium.
Sun did a lot of engineering stuff "right" in the late '90s, and again over the past couple years: they were first to market with a mainstream-grade MP kernel and first to market with a mainstream 64 bit OS, and recently they have ZFS and DTrace to talk about.
On the other hand, I think you could have predicted probably starting in 2001 that nobody was going to pay that much for large-scale MP, 64 bits, and advanced filesystems; the entire server market swung to web stacks, which scale horizontally and move most of the systems management burden into a DBMS and out of the Adrian Cockroft and Chris Drake systems engineering realm where Sun has excelled.
I really think that if you compare the systems-level innovation at Apple to the systems-level innovation at Sun, Apple comes out ahead. And systems-level innovation isn't even their core competancy.
I think there was another big sea-change caused by AMD.
Before this, architecture and ISA were absolutely key - RISC was the way of the future. RISC architectures were theoretically running loops around CISC ones.
AMD bolted a CISC onto a RISC core and effectively made this architecture point moot. This approach let AMD and Intel use their momentum and market to catch up and overtake their workstation friends.
The big sea change that AMD caused is that 64-bit processors are now a commodity. Intel COULD have done that without AMD, but I doubt that they WOULD have if AMD hadn't essentially forced their hand.
And it's so ironic that people who were not married to x86 architectures enjoyed 64-bit computing a full decade before it became mainstream (as in "you could order a box from Dell")...
And that Sun had one of the first full implementations (I think MIPS got there first).
Yeah - although microcode had been around for a very long time.
The difference between microcode and RISC was the amount of synchronisation - RISC generally implied lots of uniform, high performance operations. Microcode could, but didn't necessarily. e.g. Microcode could still be doing funky co-ordination with lots of specialised execution units (and did afaik). This has some similarities to RISC, but RISC is a different philosophy really - namely fewer types, pipelined accesses, uniform instructions, more registers, etc.
(In my view) the big watershed moment was AMD's K5 architecture. This was literally based on one of AMD's pure RISC designs. It wasn't that popular in itself, but it set up a golden age for AMD... Which really only came to an end with Intel's Core.
Microcode is an implementation technique. Micro-ops (or whatever Intel formally calls them) is an instruction dispatch architecture --- an actual microarchitectural feature.
Dropping SPARC completely would be foolish, better just rebrand everything to IBM and take it from there.
Think Compaq, now think Sun.